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As I do every July, it is once again time for my annual anniversary fund-raising campaign to support this website and the work I do here.

 

This year I celebrate Behind the Black’s sixteenth anniversary. In those sixteen years I have done more than 35,000 posts (which means I added more than 2,000 in the last year), with my main focus covering the global space industry and the related planetary and astronomical science that comes from it. Along the way I sometimes also post my thoughts on the politics and culture of the time, partly because I think it is important for free Americans to do so, and partly because those politics and culture have a direct impact on the future of our civilization and its on-going efforts to explore and eventually colonized the solar system.

 

You can’t understand one without understanding the other.

 

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ULA takes out a loan to cover losses due to Vulcan grounding

8:46 am

It appears that the rocket company ULA (owned jointly by Lockheed Martin and Boeing) has taken out a loan, guaranteed by Lockheed Martin to as much as $500 million, in order to cover the loss of income due to the grounding of ULA’s Vulcan rocket.

In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing about its second-quarter financial results July 23, Lockheed Martin revealed that it provided a bank guarantee for a loan taken by ULA during the quarter. Lockheed owns 50% of ULA, while Boeing owns the other half. “During the first quarter of 2026, ULA’s Vulcan Centaur rocket experienced performance challenges that are negatively affecting ULA’s financial condition and results of operations,” Lockheed stated in the filing. “In the second quarter of 2026, we agreed to guarantee certain ULA borrowings under which maximum potential future payments amount to $500 million.”

“The fair value of the guarantee obligation we recognized in the second quarter of 2026 amounts to $64 million and our investment in ULA has increased by a corresponding amount,” it added.

Though the article assumes Boeing contributed an equal guarantee, the company did not respond to inquiries and has not confirmed this assumption.

Vulcan is grounded because of nozzle issues with Northrop Grumman’s strap-on solid-fueled boosters, used to maximize the rocket’s payload capacity. Northrop says it has pinned down the issue, redesigned the nozzle, and expects to be ready to resume launches by the end of the year.

ULA had hoped however to launch as many as 22 times this year, with almost all of those launches Vulcan. Instead, it has only launched four times so far, with one Vulcan (with nozzle issues) and three Atlas-5 launches. The Atlas-5 is being retired, and the company only has six left in stock, all reserved by Boeing for its troubled Starliner capsule, also grounded.

As a result, NASA and the Pentagon have switched to different rockets for several of their payloads. Meanwhile, Amazon has been unable to get its Leo satellites into orbit, as it is relying heavily on Vulcan for the bulk of its launches.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

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